Time heals all wounds. When you have the power to rewind it, you begin to wonder whether it's too much responsibility for one person to hold.
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Sometimes, walking away is the sca...
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Much to Iris' dismay, there was no guidebook for rewinding time.
Though, to her credit, she did try looking up information online, she didn't get too far on her quest to figure out what exactly was happening to her and why it felt so wrong.
Most of the explanations she found were hypothetical, referring to fantasy and science fiction works of, well, fiction, provided to and from writers, and those genres had never been her strong suit (she thought she ought to give it a go, now that some of their plots apparently were no longer outside the realm of possibility). There were hypothetical questions, about how it would be possible (but never acknowledging a universe where that would be a reality) or about what one would do if they could control time, but, as far as Iris could see, she was the only person on the planet to have to deal with the actual consequences of such a thing having happened to her.
More exactly, she had made it happen—how and why, she wasn't certain, but it had happened. Silly, little Iris Fox had rewound time simply because she hadn't wanted to look like a fool during a work meeting because she hadn't bothered to get her presentation notes.
There wasn't much she knew about it, and she doubted she'd make much progress while stuck at home, but the information had to be somewhere. Knowledge was built, so it didn't come out of nowhere, but no one ever prepared you for the moment when you'd have to be the one compiling that information, and it was made even worse when one remembered there was no actual evidence to back it up. It was far too much responsibility for one single person to hold.
The little Iris knew, though, always went back to the butterfly effect and the dangers of messing around with historical events. People always wanted to go back in time and prevent certain bad people from being born, which felt right in a way, but they often failed to consider the implications of it; just because a single thing hadn't happened, history would still be changed. It could be better, but it could also be far worse, and Iris wasn't willing to gamble.
Hadn't she ruined things enough as is? Ruining her own life and future had been terrible enough; surely she couldn't risk damning the entirety of mankind simply because she was a terrible employee.
Those weren't the right thoughts to have while pacing around the freezing aisles of a grocery store.
The temperature had dropped considerably in the span of one day and, although the sun was still shining outside, Emelle Bay was still a coastal town, and it was still Oregon, so the weather wasn't to be trusted, especially during the early days of spring. As Iris' teeth chattered in the frozen food aisle and she tugged at her coat's collar to conserve some body warmth, she attempted to find some meaning in the chaos her life had turned into.
